Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Need help signing in?

MySpace

Friendster, Bebo, Tribe, Vox—we’ve missed you of late. As today is supposed to mark the end of the world, the virtual social worlds of years past have been much on our mind.

Where have they gone? Why did they go? Do we even care?

It’s hard to answer those questions without first marveling at what now falls under “social.” A decade ago, blogs and sites like Friends Reunited or Classmates.com were peripheral to our daily digital lives. Today online sociability is the norm: We turn to Yelp reviews when deciding about a restaurant or, when that fails, post on our Facebook walls—“Hey, where can I find good Thai in Philly?” We laugh at cat videos all day long, and we add our IMHO to a long list of responses to ire-inducing blog posts.

The reason for Pinterest’s impressive referral stats is at least partly attributable to its page design, as the pinboards allow users to to window shop and pick out attractive products that they want to buy.

MySpace announced this week that it clocked up 1m new users in January thanks to the launch of a new music player.

Traffic is still down 25% from the month of June (when News Corporation sold the once-dominant social network to Justin Timberlake and Specific Media) – but could the latest boost in user numbers herald a new beginning for MySpace?

With Facebook going public and expecting to receive a valuation of up to $100bn when its shares hit the market, it’s easy to forget that just a handful of years ago, Facebook wasn’t the only game in town in the social networking space.

Some of the social networking companies feeling left out after Google’s Search, plus Your World launch may very well complain to regulators already gunning for Google, but they’re not going to wait for Washington D.C. or Brussels to tell Google how to manage its SERPs.

Instead, engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace took matters into their own hands with focusontheuser.org and developed a bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that adds a “don’t be evil” button to the browser.